There are two ways to think of Swanna in Love.
Swanna in Love is primarily a funny, thought provoking, and honest depiction of a fourteen-year-old girl’s first experience of falling in love and her initial encounters with sex. Its descriptions of 80’s New England are evocative and vivid, and are only outdone by the skilful rendering of the bewildering, charming, infuriating, and riotous goings-on inside Swanna’s head.
Swanna can’t work out if she’s ten or eighteen, but being fourteen is driving her crazy. She wants to return to her home in Manhattan after a summer at camp, but her mother is besotted with a young artist, Borislav, and follows him to an artist’s commune in Vermont, dragging Swanna and Swanna’s little brother, Madding, with her. The children sleep outside on the flatbed of a pick-up truck because the commune doesn’t allow kids. Meanwhile Swanna’s father is gallivanting around Manhattan with his new love interest after deserting the family home. Swanna follows his capers with horror via the society column of a New York newspaper.
What Swanna wants and needs is some semblance of sanity to return to her life, preferably in her family townhouse on the Upper West Side, preferably with her parents re-united, preferably in time for the new school term. But with her immediate family too self-absorbed to understand how troubled she is, without the support of the very people who should grok her anguish and provide her with the requisite time and attention to enable her to find her balance, she becomes involved with Dennis.
And this leads us to the other way to think of Swanna in Love.
Swanna in Love is a study of a man in his thirties who falls for a fourteen-year-old girl and acts on his desire, though he knows she is underage. Dennis is dangerous. He knows the psychological damage he might cause, but he carries on the affair, regardless. There are no mitigating circumstances that justify his behaviour. I wanted to yell at him to leave Swanna to grow up in peace, to tell Swanna that Dennis isn’t good for her, that if no one is coming for her, she should bask in the warmth of her brother’s friendship, instead. And this demonstrates how well written Swanna in Love is, because Dennis comes across as a living, breathing sleazebag, and his actions made me angry. Even in a fictional universe, he doesn’t get to behave the way he does without censure.
The two ways of considering the book are not incompatible. Swanna in Love is indeed a joyful coming of age tale, full of wonderful detail, skilfully drawn characters, and beautiful set-pieces. Swanna in Love is also a depiction of a despicable, cynical doctor who should know better. Chekov’s gun gets several mentions, and America is duly warned that, if there’s a gun in the house, at some point, it will be fired. And similarly, if enough middle-aged men get giddy at the presence of an under-aged girl, one or more will act on their desire. There’s always a predator in the pack whose goals are entirely self-serving, who believe it’s their right to make a play at whomever they choose. If it wasn’t Dennis making a pass, it would be one of his friends.
As a first-person narrative, we don’t know anything about Swanna’s life that she doesn’t tell us, and she’s an unreliable narrator. Swanna might be making it all up, that like her claim to have water-skied (when she hasn’t), she makes herself believe she’s done things she only imagines. There’s a part of me that wants that to be the case, that the novel is the inner workings of the mind of a teenage girl, dreaming of adult occupations. I hope that’s true, but nowhere does the author seriously offer that as an explanation for the novel.
Swanna in Love is based on the experiences of the author, Jennifer Belle. She wrote the novel in the knowledge that her own children are of an age to read it and to question her about it. I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with Belle writing this novel. Every fiction writer should be free to utilise their own experiences however they choose, whatever that experience. Some books need to be written, and it’s obvious from the flow of the text, the nature of the language, and Belle’s interviews that this book was going to find its way onto the page, even if she tried not to write it. I don’t believe the book would be improved had Belle added a layer of moralising or preaching. This is Swanna’s tale, told as Swanna wishes to tell it. And she’s a handful, no question. She calls the cops on her mother and Borislav, which is both very funny and a warning sign that she’s losing it. And she chooses not to shop Dennis to the police. We learn a lot about Swanna’s value system through her story-telling, less so about Belle’s.
If these things really happened to Belle when she was younger, and if she came through with no mental scars, then that’s a credit to her and her resilience. It’s too easy to say some young women grow up early – that’s the kind of reasoning that gives the conscience of predators a Get Out of Jail card.
Swanna in Love is a very good book, whichever way you look at it. Easy to read, resonant, and infinitely thought provoking. But if there’s a jail for fictional characters, Dennis should be locked up.
Jennifer Belle. Swanna in Love. Dead Ink Press, 2024.
CRAIG SMITH IS A POET AND NOVELIST FROM HUDDERSFIELD. HIS WRITING HAS APPEARED ON WRITERS REBEL, ATRIUM, IAMBAPOET AND THE MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE REVIEW, AS WELL BEING A WINNER OF THE POETRY ARCHIVE NOW! WORDVIEW 2022.CRAIG HAS THREE BOOKS TO HIS NAME: POETRY COLLECTIONS, L.O.V.E. LOVE (SMITH/DOORSTOP) AND A QUICK WORD WITH A ROCK AND ROLL LATE STARTER, (RUE BELLA); AND A NOVEL, SUPER-8 (BOYD JOHNSON). HE RECENTLY RECEIVED AN MA IN CREATIVE WRITING AT BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON.
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